Saving history with AI. Advances in nerve regeneration. Tricking AI into believing a fake disease. All that and more in this week’s edition of The Prototype. All that and more in this week’s edition of The Prototype. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.

All around the country, historical societies, libraries and universities have boxes of archived material waiting to be reviewed and cataloged. It can take an archivist more than an hour to process the items in a single box. As a result, some institutions have months-long or even years-long backlogs, keeping key parts of our history unknown to the present.

Dean Serrentino and his company, Historiq, aim to fix this bottleneck with Una, an AI platform designed to accelerate archiving. Instead of painstakingly cataloging items “with a clipboard and a pencil,” Una enables archivists to verbally describe their observations as they examine material, Serrentino said. Those notes are then plugged into their institution’s data system. Plus, any documents they find can be simultaneously digitized using laptop or phone cameras.

This both speeds up and improves accuracy of the cataloging process. When they don’t have to write everything down, archivists put “more context and historical description out of their brains and into the system,” he said. He added that the AI only produces drafts that require review and approval to ensure the human element is present.

Historiq was founded in 2025 with a $1.25 million investment from edtech company Curriculum Associates Chairman Rob Waldron. It already counts several institutions among its customers. One of those is Revolutionary War site Fort Ticonderoga, which plans to use Una to digitize its rare book collection later this year.

Discovery of the Week: Tricking AI Into Believing In A Fake Disease

A team of scientists invented a condition called “bixonimania” and published two fake papers about it on a preprint server in early 2024, along with a couple of posts on Medium. The papers were published under........

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